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Neil Diamond To Headline 2018 Mission Estate Concert!
Wednesday, 25 October 2017, 8:37 am Press Release: Mission Estate Winery
The Mission Estate Concert announces that musical icon, Grammy Award® winner and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member, Neil Diamond, will perform at the 2018 concert on Saturday, 17 March 2018.
The Mission Concert is part of Neil Diamond’s world tour celebrating his incomparable 50-year career and hits spanning decades such as Cherry Cherry, Holly Holy, Cracklin’ Rosie, Song Sung Blue, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Solitary Man, Sweet Caroline, Love on the Rocks, Desiree and Shilo.
The Exclusive Mission Concert Club Box Office opens at 9am Friday 27 October www.missionconcert.co.nz. If you are not a member or have changed your email address since the last concert, simply go to www.missionconcert.co.nz and update your details. Registration is free and members will be kept posted with all the latest event news.
For Concert Club members who will not have direct internet access on Friday morning you will receive, via email, a special code that can be used to purchase tickets at any Ticketek Outlet also from 9am Friday 27 October.
All remaining tickets will be available to the general public at 9am on Saturday, 28 October via Ticketek and the Mission Concert website.
More: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1710/S00434/neil-diamond-to-headline-2018-mission-estate-concert.htm

Neil Diamond grosses $1.2M from concert at Philips Arena in Atlanta
Thousands of Neil Diamond lovers in Atlanta must have wanted to tell the singer/songwriter "Hello Again" during his most recent show in the Peach State.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee performed at Philips Arena in Atlanta April 30 in front of 12,235 fans (13,197 tickets were allotted). The show, which was promoted by Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Live Nation Entertainment Inc. (NYSE: LYV), had $1,207,288 in gross sales, according to data recently compiled by Billboard.
More here: http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2017/05/09/neil-diamond-grosses-1-2m-from-concert-at-philips.html

On his golden anniversary tour, Neil Diamond still shines
Call it a golden anniversary for a diamond. Neil Diamond, that is, who is celebrating 50 years as a hit recording artist with a world tour that stopped Wednesday at Scottrade Center.
Musing on the five decades gone by, Diamond told the crowd, “I was 7 years old when I started.”
He was joking, but he wasn’t off by much. Diamond, 76, started writing songs as a teenager and by the mid-‘60s was working in the famed Brill Building, cranking out tunes for various pop stars of the day. “Solitary Man,” his debut single as a recording artist in his own right, was released in 1966.
Diamond’s two-hour Scottrade show was packed with hits and was deeply nostalgic for fans and the artist as well. He talked and sang about his Brooklyn beginnings, recalling his home turf’s tough neighborhoods in “Jungletime” and showed old home movies (on a diamond-shaped video screen, no less) during “Brooklyn Roads.”
The hits were the concert’s main draw, of course, and Diamond delivered them in bunches, starting off with “Cherry Cherry” and moving quickly into slower, romantic fare including “September Morn” and “Longfellow Serenade.”
Introducing “Play Me,” he said: “It’s not easy for a man to come up here and make himself vulnerable. We’re supposed to be tough and able to handle it all — doing everything that’s demanded of a man, except being vulnerable in front of 12,614 people.”
If Diamond felt at all exposed — which seems unlikely — the crowd backed him up by singing along with the song’s chorus.
There were plenty of other opportunities to sing along, among them “Song Sung Blue,” “I’m a Believer” (initially a hit for the Monkees and revived decades later for the “Shrek” soundtrack) and “Forever in Blue Jeans.”
Diamond was backed by two singers and an 11-piece band that was rock-solid and unobtrusive, though the players knew when to shine, such as Larry Klimas’ saxophone solo, which stood in for Barbra Streisand’s vocal on “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Diamond moved slowly and somewhat stiffly as he played to all sides of the stage, but his voice was strong — low and gravelly when he spoke/sang some lyrics but soaring when it needed to.
The set included a moody, brooding take on “Solitary Man,” an upbeat, rhythm-heavy “Sooliamon,” and a medley from “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” Diamond closed with a handful of songs he noted had appeared on his epochal live album “Hot August Night”: “Done Too Soon” (its relentless recitation of historical figures’ names an obvious precursor — and better alternative — to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”), “Holly Holy” and “I Am … I Said.”
The four-song encore kept the crowd on its feet with the requisite singalong “Sweet Caroline,” plus “Cracklin’ Rosie,” “America” and a revival-tent-raising “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” which included a plea for everyone — “black and white, rich and poor, gay and straight, great and small/We are God’s children all,” Diamond preached — sending the crowd back into the street with both a message of inclusiveness and no shortage of familiar tunes running through their heads.
Set list
“Cherry, Cherry”
“You Got to Me”
“September Morn”
“Longfellow Serenade”
“Love on the Rocks”
“Play Me”
“Beautiful Noise”
“Jungletime”
“If You Know What I Mean”
“Song Sung Blue”
“Forever in Blue Jeans”
“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”
“Solitary Man”
“I’m a Believer”
“Brooklyn Roads”
“Pretty Amazing Grace”
“Be”/“Lonely Looking Sky”/“Skybird”
“Jazz Time”
“Soolaimon”
“Done Too Soon”
“Holly Holy”
“I Am … I Said”
Encore
“Sweet Caroline”
“Cracklin’ Rosie”
“America”
“Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show”
Link: http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/music/reviews/on-his-golden-anniversary-tour-neil-diamond-still-shines/article_ad73552d-5bd7-5c1f-a3ba-de9df672c457.html
There are great photos at the link as well.

Neil Diamond Talks 50th Anniversary Tour, New Christmas LP
It's been a weird couple of days for Neil Diamond. Two nights before speaking with Rolling Stone, he teamed up with Jimmy Fallon to take on Natalie Portman and J.J. Abrams in a game of Password, but got completely crushed in a clip already viewed more than a million times. (Diamond didn't help his team much when Fallon's hints of "mamba" and "guacamole" elicited a response of "salad" and not the correct answer of "salsa.") Then the following night he performed a medley of Christmas songs from his new LP Acoustic Christmas in pelting rain during Rockefeller Center's Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. "It was a little pandemonious and slippery," he says. "I had fun once I got onstage and stopped worrying about falling off the stage."
Right now, Diamond is warm, dry and ready to eat some lunch in the lobby restaurant of a luxury hotel on the Upper East Side. It's the sort of place that offers a three-course prix-fixe menu for $48, but Diamond can't find a single thing he wants and asks for the bar menu, ultimately just telling his wife/manager Katie McNeil, seated a nearby table, to just pick something she thinks he'll like. She goes with chicken noodle soup and a Caesar salad, but once it comes he notices the salad has anchovies, which he meticulously picks out one-by-one and places on a side plate during our interview.
There's a lot to talk about. Not only is Acoustic Christmas the fourth Christmas album for a singer known as the "Jewish Elvis," but the 75-year-old just announced dates for a massive 50th anniversary tour in 2017. Diamond spoke with RS about what fans can expect from the tour, what compels him to spend so much time on the road at this point in his life, and his memories of performing at the Last Waltz, which took place just over 40 years ago.
More: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/neil-diamond-talks-50th-anniversary-tour-new-christmas-lp-w453713
I'm only posting the 1st three paragraphs. I'd love to know what some of you think of the some of the possible set list songs. One song in particular thrills me, and would be worth the price of admission to see him sing it.

By Andrew Johnston
Published
01/07/2015
It may have been the hottest day of the year, but the sun wasn’t the only thing shining in Belfast last night.
Musical legend Neil Diamond glistened like his namesake at the first of two sold-out Odyssey Arena dates.
Coming on stage beneath a gemstone-shaped lighting rig and backed by a band the size of a small army, there was nothing understated about this most showbiz of shows.
Despite being 74, Diamond cut a remarkably youthful figure, sporting a cowboy-style shirt and a pair of jeans many men a third his age would be lucky to fit into.
The crowd-pleasing crooner began as he meant to go on, leading a chorus of several thousand voices through I’m A Believer, the first of several tunes penned by Diamond but made famous by someone else.
Love On The Rocks and Hello Again saw the singer wringing some heavy emotion from the material to the delight of his fans, many of whom could probably chart their lives to Diamond’s back catalogue.
And the hits kept coming — Solitary Man, Play Me and a wonderfully overwrought Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon.
“It feels awfully nice to hear women screaming my name out,” Diamond joked.
“It makes me feel like I’m 70 again.” The self-deprecating humour was definitely welcome.
When he hit the high notes, Diamond’s ‘well-maintained’ phizzog appeared fixed in a grimace, and when he thumped his chest, it wasn’t clear if he was showing his appreciation or signalling a heart attack.
But the crowd had the ageing icon’s back.
“We’re all in this together,” he announced before rousing everyone out of their seats for Red, Red Wine, rendered in the UB40 style, complete with rapping mid-section.
A handful of tracks from his latest album Melody Road were politely received, but soon it was back to the big numbers, climaxing with Song Sung Blue, Holly Holy and a soaring I Am... I Said.
The encore brought more singalongs on Cracklin’ Rosie, Sweet Caroline and America. In terms of knowing what his fans want and giving it to them in spades, there’s nothing crazy about this Diamond.
Fours stars
Link: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/music/reviews/review-neil-diamond-shines-bright-as-he-belts-out-the-hits-31343036.html

Veteran crooner's folksy stridency and wattled, lounge-lizard charisma carries the audience along, writes Ed Power
By Ed Power
11:40PM BST 30 Jun 2015
Neil Diamond is not wildly revered in the fashion of contemporaries such as Burt Bacharach or Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. However, he has never exactly been uncool either – one of the reasons super-producer Rick Rubin failed at his mission to rehabilitate Diamond with 2005's stripped-down 12 Songs album was that the crooner's reputation didn't require rescuing in the first place.
Instead, the composer of several of the late 20th century's enduring soft pop anthems exists in curious isolation – beloved by his considerable fan base but otherwise a marginal presence, an icon who casts an oddly diminished shadow. He continues to tour and record yet already feels like a figure out of history.
That's despite an often formidable catalogue, which he negotiated at a breezy canter on the opening date of a new UK tour. Witnessing the throaty, crowd-pleasing Red Red Wine and Beautiful Noise reprised by Diamond's rambunctious backing band, it seemed remarkable the 74-year-old's stock is not higher – even a tune as superficially throwaway as I'm A Believer, originally a hit for The Monkees, was revealed to be an ingenious marriage of the upbeat and the autumnal.
Dressed like Austin Powers's groovy grandfather, the sequins on his tight-fit trousers glimmering under the spotlight, Diamond furthermore defied the unofficial rule that veteran performers must turn grumpier with age (see Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young etc). As the set teetered during a mid-period drift into lesser known numbers, he remained endlessly smiley and animated - wattled, lounge-lizard charisma carrying the audience along.
That slouching charm also obscured the cracks and warps in a voice that, after six decades in the business, is no longer the burnished instrument it once was. Then, Diamond was never adored because of his technical virtuosity or his dad dancing (a tradition he was championing before the concept was even recognised). His appeal was always grounded in the dash of his songwriting which, without ever tipping towards melodrama or portentousness, runs the gamut of human experience.
Indeed, there are arguably vestiges of greatness in his repertoire. Have another three and a half minutes of pop articulated the perspective of the underdog as searingly as I Am… I Said? Who else could tenderly address a teenage girl's growing pains – as Diamond does on Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon – without coming off an inveterate creep?
He finished with I've Been This Way Before, a Sinatra-esque power-ballad from 1974. A cheesy troubadour warbling about life's cruelties and contradictions sounds like a fast-pass to middle-of-the-road purgatory. But Diamond's faith in the material was unbending and his folksy stridency short-circuited the listener's cynicism. Suddenly you were a true believer too.
Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/live-music-reviews/11706980/Neil-Diamond-Odyssey-Arena-Belfast-review-Vestiges-of-greatness-in-his-repertoire.html
I hate it when writers add snark to try to be cool or whatever their reason. -Melissa

Another wonderful review from Dallas. Wish I could have been there.
My favorite quote from this one: "Funny how time and pointless snark try to tear down your heroes." How true is that?
And... I'll try to add a photo from the article.

Warning: If you are easlily offended by language click out of this article now.
This article cracked me up! My favorite quote:
It was a perfectly lovely evening... That probably ended in a lot of lovely gramma boning.
A Neil friend told me a long time ago that Neil's concerts always put her in the mood. LOL!

This article literally made me laugh out loud. I remember meeting a young couple who had never seen Neil at a concert years ago and told the guy pretty much the same thing. Many of Neil's songs ARE about sex.

Confessions of an Obsessive Neil Diamond Collector Learning to Love the Jewish Elvis by Amassing Objects
by Travis Ritter
He got the way to move me, Cherry, he got the way to groove me.
Somewhere in the world, possibly in a landfill, or in some dusty basement of a thrift store in Northern California, there is a copy of the Neil Diamond LP September Morn with Neil's eyes bloodshot by a red Sharpie marker, and a blackened, bleeding red pentagram on his forehead.
I'm responsible for that, and for the eye patches, blacked-out teeth, and excessive body and facial hair that adorn the custom-vandalized covers of another 30 or so Neil Diamond records. Something about defacing Diamond's sage, somber face was funny to me, but it wasn't done in malice. I was a bored teenager in search of amusement, it's true, but more importantly, I was a believer.
And besides, the records I defiled were just the doubles. The Neil Diamond LP collection I amassed in my late teens—primarily from the bins of Bogbean Books and Music in my hometown of Redding, California, at a quarter or a dime apiece—was extensive enough that duplicates were inevitable. By the time I was 18, I had somewhere between 70 and 80 unique Neil Diamond records, including almost every single studio recording through the late '80s, all his live records, best ofs, and soundtracks. The condition of these LPs was generally bad, but I didn't care. Any time I found a Neil Diamond record I didn't have, I bought it, storing it away on the top shelf of my closet, my Diamonds in the dark. None of my friends knew what I was doing. No one needed to know I owned three copies of The Jazz Singer, or two Jonathan Livingston Seagulls, or a pristine copy of Stones. I bought a CD compilation of his Early Years, and listened to it constantly in my bedroom, alone. I eventually found someone I could bond with over Neil Diamond, and I lost my virginity to her. Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon.
Neil Diamond had become cool again in the 1990s. After Urge Overkill covered "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, a number of bands followed suit, including pop-punk band Groovie Ghoulies covering "Hello Again," and Murder City Devils (with Kim Warnick) doing "I'll Come Running." The bands did Neil proud, and I welcomed it.
It was when eBay was still the Wild West of vintage and tour T-shirts from the early '80s were still cheap. I found a perfect Neil Diamond T-shirt for $10, a size-small ringer tee with a stunning framed portrait of a shirtless Neil in a black leather jacket, perfectly coiffed, chest plumage untamed, a sexier version of the cover art to the album he was touring at the time, On the Way to the Sky. The back listed Midwest concert dates in black with SOLD OUT emblazoned in red across each show. This shirt became my second skin, and not just because it was skin-tight (this was during the indie-rock tiny-tee heyday at the turn of the century). I wore it almost every day, including the day I boarded an airplane with a one-way ticket to Houston, where I would be moving in with the only two people I knew. I ended up meeting a lot of people because of that shirt. Some people thought I wore it out of irony. I knew better, which is why my heart broke when, six short months later, the dryer in my apartment stopped rotating during its drying cycle while still blasting heat. A majority of the shirt was charred, but by some freaky act of divinity—like when a single house is left standing in a tornado-ravaged county— the image of Neil Diamond was spared. Now we were both shirtless.
Over the course of two nights, I carefully cut the graphic away from the carbonized T-shirt and hand-stitched it to the back of a blue Rustler denim jacket that never quite fit right. I christened it the Forever in Blue Jean jacket and wore it everywhere.
Years later, I wore it to my first-ever Neil Diamond concert at Toyota Center in Houston, joined by my girlfriend at the time. I scored a free pair of tickets from the publisher of Houston Press, where I was working at the time. The seats weren't great: nosebleeds in a side wing, high above the main floor, but the show was magnificent, packed to the gills with decades of hits, performed with all the schmaltz, pomp, and dazzle one expects from a true showman. As he sang "America," an eagle soared across the wind-rippled canopy of a blazing American flag on the Jumbotron, and I bopped along in a surreal communion with the near-capacity arena crowd of grandmothers, daughters, and a tiny minority of stray males dragged along by their spouses. None of this was enough to keep my girlfriend awake. She slept through at least half of the show. On the way out, the only merchandise I could afford was a bumper sticker that said "I'd Rather Be at a Neil Diamond Concert. World Tour 2005."
I moved to Seattle the following year, stopping back in Redding to collect the things I'd stored at my mom's house before moving to Houston. It was comforting to picture my secret Neil Diamond records in the closet where I'd left them. But they weren't there. Because many of them were marked up with Sharpie and collage, my mom had assumed they were junk and donated the lot. I was devastated. All those records, discarded, dispersed, dry your eyes, come dry your eyes. I could never bring myself to rebuild the collection. It was too much to bear. Despite the undeniable kitsch factor that rides shotgun in Neil Diamond's cultural stretch limousine, the project of collecting and even defacing those albums had been an act of discovering love among the rubble of objects—the way music fandom used to work. Not that I was conscious of it at the time; my obsessive-compulsive Neil Diamond habit was always more of a "before you get to feeling good, you simply got no choice" kind of situation.
A handful of remnants survived the purge. Before leaving Houston, I had purchased the 1970 Shilo compilation with the connect-the-dots cover (scribbled on). It still sits on my record shelf today. The Forever in Blue Jean jacket hangs in my closet next to the "NEIL F**KING DIAMOND" T-shirt I bought off Neil Diamond's webstore last October when his latest album, Melody Road (which I also have), was released. And I just pulled out the "I'd Rather Be at a Neil Diamond Concert" bumper sticker I bought at his show in 2005, feeling a burst of excitement knowing I'll actually be at a Neil Diamond concert the week you read this. Given what happened last time, I'll probably go alone, a solitary man.
And I know exactly what I'm going to wear.
Link: http://www.thestranger.com/music/feature/2015/05/06/22175511/confessions-of-an-obsessive-neil-diamond-collector
Fabulous article. I hope he enjoys the heck out of that concert. Rock on, Neil

It's full of mistakes...
Neil Diamond is eager to please his fans at Xcel Power Center A practically complete property of grinning, cheering fans mentioned "hello again" to light-rock superstar Neil Diamond on Sunday evening at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center. The show marked Diamond's eighth local functionality of the new century and sixth...
A practically complete property of grinning, cheering fans mentioned "hello again" to light-rock superstar Neil Diamond on Sunday evening at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center.
...snip
Diamond opened powerful, with a horn-heavy "I'm a Believer" into "Desiree" and a extremely dramatic "Adore on the Rocks.Advertisement" Five numbers in, he played "Pretty Remarkable Grace," a song from his 2008 album "House Ahead of Dark" that he's worked challenging to establish as a new classic. Later in the evening, he provided three cuts from his latest record, "Melody Road," which was inspired by his wife. The first two, "Practically nothing But a Heartache" and "In Superior Days," have been pleasant sufficient and sounded at house with his '70s work. By "The Art of Like," on the other hand, the crowd began to get restless.
Elsewhere, Diamond introduced "Brooklyn Roads" with a story about his childhood and throwback photos flickering behind him on the diamond-shaped major screen. He also decided to rap one particular of the verses of "Red Red Wine," a move that was just about every bit as awkward as it sounds.
In a testament to just how deep his catalog of hits runs, Diamond completed the show with a whopping eight crowd-pleasers in a row: "Forever in Blue Jeans," "Cherry, Cherry," "Holly Holy," "I Am ... I Stated," "Cracklin' Rosie," "Sweet Caroline," "America" and "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show." Just when the crowd believed that was it, Diamond wrapped items up with "Heartlight." Inspired by the film "E.T.," the 1982 single stands as his last mainstream hit to date, and he hasn't played it on tour in more than two decades. Regardless of a handful of rough spots, Diamond's heartlight was shining all through the evening.
Pop music critic Ross Raihala can be reached at 651-228-5553. Comply with him at twitter.com/RossRaihala.
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